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worker specializing in racialized trauma, communal healing and cultural first aid. As the leading proponent of somatic abolitionism and embodied anti-racist practice for living and culture building, Resma is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Semantics Institute. Resma is the author of The New York Times Best Seller, My Grandmother's Hands, racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies, the quaking
of America and monsters in love. You can learn more about Resma and his work at resma.com. So Resma, we're just jumping right in with you. Let's do it. I read My Grandmother's Hands a long time ago and it blew my mind, which is I think was your point to be getting people out of their minds. And now I understand it completely differently because I have been in and out of recovery for 30 years. It just becomes whack-a-mole for me. It becomes something
different every few years that I'm addicted to. And I have tried to recover in my mind for 30 years. So I just keep thinking, okay, I've got it now. I know how I'm thinking about this. It's just patriarchy. It's diet culture. It's big pharma. It's wine culture. I've got it. And then I keep not getting cured. This last round of recovery, I have finally through tons of therapy and whatever allowed it to drop into my body, the recovery and
understand that I don't even know what's an understanding. Feel that my problem is just in my past and my parents and their parents and their parents in the culture. And it's like all living in my body. So your work to me is like our world has all of these terrible symptoms, whack-a-mole symptoms, just what we see, the violence, the racism, the wars, the genocides. And we keep trying to solve it by making up new words intellectually, like
thinking our way out of it. And I know personally that that's not how it works that we don't heal that way. I feel like if we actually had a world that actually wanted to solve racism, you would be the teacher that everybody would put everywhere. Shit, I hope not, God damn I'm not gonna. What is trauma, resma? Like what just? Well, you did a pretty good description of it. I mean, so I have no interest in being
anybody fucking guru. I come from a people that every time we start to begin to talk about liberation and start to begin to talk about ushering in the living and body and anti-racist, genitive culture, start to begin to talk about maybe, maybe it's not the past that we need to be cultivating. Maybe it's the new futures that we need to be called. Like those people coming from people that look like me, we get bullets in the fucking
head. They don't appreciate us until we're dead and then they can quantify us in terms of one speech we shall fucking overcome when you're the most revolutionary man on the planet at the time. White folks love Dr. King now. He was the most hated man in America at the time. And so I hope that God, I don't, people don't start. I got a grand baby that's coming in June. I'd really like to see him get to 30. Yeah, I just need to start with
that. I'd find it more interesting to have people begin to, just like you said, you understand it differently now than you did when you first started reading it. And I tell people all the time, my books are not books you read, their books you do. And it takes
on average nine to 13 months for people to get through my book in the first place. If they're doing the practices, if they're just fucking around and just reading it as a readers digest or something like that, then you know, yeah, you get through it in a couple days.
But if you're actually doing the practice, it takes you nine to 13 months. And then when you go over it again, because you're not the same person when you started, you actually pick up a, so you're like them, the rest of my come to my bedroom and write some new shit in this book, because now I'm picking up on it, right? And that's because the practices are most important. It's not even the reading. It's like how you experience revulsion at
trying to do the practices and then throwing the book up against the wall. What you do when you get to a certain part and you go, Oh, that was nice. I'm never fucking doing that practice again. I'm not like that's part of how this stuff works. It's not, I'm giving you the secret or the five tips to giving to a beautiful relationship. And that's it. Don't worry. People are a part of creation. We're not apart from creation. And we so busy
trying to find the secret and the answer that we're missing the emergence. What needs to happen in order for us to grow to fuck up ain't a tip that rarely ends up being a tip that we go, Oh, shit. I'm going to change my whole people know that if you meet somebody in a fucking bar and you take them home, you probably should put a condom on or you probably should have a dental dam or you probably should do fucking something, right? Most people
don't do that. We all like we got the knowledge. Like people have told us to do this shit, right? The same way with the cigarettes. It says on the pack on the side of the cigarette, but if you motherfuckers smoke this, you are going to die. And we're like not me. It is not you see a car like that. We all know that there's certain shit. The knowledge is never been a curative element for human beings. Yes. Never is can they develop the capacity to tolerate what it takes to grow the fuck up and
you have to temper and condition your body, especially when we're talking about race. And especially when we're talking about white folks, white folks have white bodies have no, no communal efficacy when it comes to race. None. None. I'm telling you to in all three of you, if you come up to me or see me a thing after this fucking thing and you say, well, or that's fine. You know, I had a friend and we used to do it. We marched in the shit.
Don't like your fucking racial resume is not communal tempering. It's not conditioning. What's happening to me and my people is not happening because individual white people are nice or not nice. That is not what's happening. It is because it is a structure, a philosophy that emerges and evolves and most white folks benefit from it. They're advantage to buy it. That's the piece. So I'm sorry. What was your first? What is trauma? Doesn't matter
but. Okay. Okay. Yes. What is trauma? And what do people need to do to grow the fuck up? What is the equivalent of wearing the condom in life? So the way that my brain works, my agent and friends always those that know supposedly like when I first started writing my first book. So the way that I write. So let me tell you the way that I write first off. So the way that I write is that I'll usually go to his house or go to somebody else's house.
And I stumbled on this is that what I do is we record it. We record whatever I write or whatever I want to talk about. And then we get enough of those together and then create the book. So that's why my book sound like I'm talking. Right. It's because we do that and then we edit them. I get it back from the transcriptionist and then we add and we add other things in and stuff like that. So that's how I write all my books. The only way that that was able to happen. The reason why we
stumble on that is because my agent calls me a polymath. And what that means is that in this is the way that my brain is always when people are asking me things, my brain is thinking about it in seven different levels. I'm thinking about the sensory pieces. I'm thinking about the vibratory piece. My body is reacting to the meaning making the urges. So that's all happening for me at the same time. And so when you ask me a question around what's trauma. So for me,
basically, trauma is what happens. And this is from Brother Gaboor, is what happens inside of you when what happens happened. Right. And so it is a move that happens. It's not conscious. It's not a like, oh, I'm going to do that. It's just your body says this particular thing is too much, too fast, too soon or too long. There wasn't enough reparative stuff that happens, which is mostly what fucks people. And when that happened, your sense of yourself and your sense of yourself in the
world, shifted and got stuck. That's trauma. And so it can be anything that happens. There's too much too fast, too soon or too long, along with something of that reparative that should have happened that didn't. And most people when we talk about trauma, they can go into therapy. And they can say, this happened. My uncle did this, my daddy did this, my mom did this, did it, right. But what they can't usually articulate is what should have happened that didn't.
Hmm. That's good. Oh, repair. Yeah. So what is the significance of that that they can't actually say it is that the equivalent of imagining the world differently? Well, it's not even the saying it is how your body and how you position yourself once you can't get at that. You start to organize yourself around this should have happened, but it didn't. You start to organize, well, fuck it then. Fuck you. Like, if that's the way it is, then this is how I'm going to get down.
And it's not conscious. So here's one of the things that I say when I'm doing my practices in my workshop is I say that just the march of time, time decontextualizes trauma, right. Time, just time. So if we're on a call right now, y'all, and somebody comes in and y'all see some shit go down and they put a gun to the back of my head and I start fighting, they beat the fuck out of it, right. And then something happened and y'all, you know, everything's happening and everything.
And then a month from now, y'all say, okay, we got to check back in with Resma, right. And then we do a Zoom call and the Zoom call comes on. And I'm under call which are and I'm but ass naked babbling, right. I'm doing. He's like, I'm, he's like, crazy, right. There's not one person on this call that wouldn't say something happened to him. I saw it. We experienced it. We got to get Resma some help. Do we have his wife's number? We got it, right. There would be no doubt in my
mind that you would say we know and we saw what happened to him. You will contextualize it right? You'll say this happened and now he's acting in these particular ways, right? What if you never saw it? Wow. Then we just think you're crazy. Right. So here's what I always say, when trauma happens in the person, decontextualize. And it goes unattended to what happens is that the march of time can make that look like
personality. Traumatic happens in the body. In a person, over time, can look like personality. Traumatic happens in the family, over time, looks like family traits. Traumatic happens in that people can look like culture. Traumatic in a culture can look intrinsic or natural. So is this why when people, families, or cultures refuse to witness, have accountability, face the truth, then all of our stories go haywire. And we think everybody's crazy.
It collapses. It collapses, right? It collapses into personality. It collapses into family traits. It collapses into culture, right? And then when we go to talk about it, all of the charge comes into the room before the resolution. The resolution can't happen because people are contending with the charge in the body. This is why when people say, well, we need to have an intervention. You know, when that happens, we need to sit, do talk and people go,
yeah, we may need to do that. And you're probably right. But this is going to be some bullshit. Why? Because this 400 years of charge, 500 years of charge, 30 years of charge, and nobody is tempered in condition to deal with the charge. We think, let's just talk about it. Let's just get together and do a reconciliation. Let's get together and do, right? And the charge burns. So one of the contracts that I have is I'm working with the meadows, right?
I do work with the meadows, right? Treatment facility. And one of the things I've been trying to get in working with the therapist on is that if you can't work with the charge first, then when people come into the room and they tell you about their use, they tell you about the sexual stuff that happened to you, they tell you about all of this shit, right? You give them advice about how to deal with it. But you don't understand that the advice that
you're giving them is not getting at the charge. They're asking you a question, well, how do we do this? How do you do it? You say, we do it like this. You do it like that. And they go, okay. And then they say, yeah, I got right. And then that chart, you can see the charge behind their eyes. And we don't know how to address that. We don't ask therapists. And I'm going to tell you this, this is the silly little fucking joke. Therapists are no
more conditioned to deal with the charge than the people that they're talking to. They are not. We don't go to school to learn how to deal with the charge. Here's the thing. I got my master's degree. I learned more about charge being fucking married than I did kidding my master's degree. Right? I learned more about the charge dealing with my drug
addicted daddy than I did in the master's degree. Right? Because I had to learn it and grow up and begin to work with the shit and nibble on it and use it as ways to condition. Listen, we're all friends. Let's say we're all friends and I come to y'all and I say, check it out. Hey, y'all, I'm thinking about playing piano. The normal question, we're like, that's really cool. I'm thinking about running the marathon. Y'all all good. Yeah, that's
cool. You know, I knew a friend that actually ran a marathon. I can get you hooked up with them so they can talk to you about it and that it out. Right? And you'd give me resources you tell you know, and just send me up, right? And then if I said to you and then if you got the bright idea to ask me the question, when am I thinking about running this marathon? You guys would go and I looked at you in all straight and I said tomorrow.
Exactly. Exactly. You smiled, you giggled, you like, okay, I got to ask another fucking question now, right? There's something else, right? Because I wasn't prepared for that. I was in your question would be, well, as much, you know, I get it, but have you run a block for it first? Do you understand that your fucking nipples are going to bleed? Like, like, your toenails are going to fall. What's happening here? And I said, no, no,
no, no, no, don't worry about it. I listen to a podcast. Yeah. Unrunning a marathon. I read it. Right. If I said that to you every time I assured you that I got it handled, you would go, you don't have this handled, right? Both things would be happening at the same time because you know, I'm unconditioned and not tempered to be able to tolerate what
I'm getting ready to go through. And why do we think race is any fucking different? Why do we think that you're opinion or you're understanding of that that's as important as temper and conditioning? Yeah. And race in this structure is traumatizing to any visibly melanated body. It is a traumatizing structure experience and philosophy. And if you don't understand that, you think your ideas and your opinion is as important as the temper and
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the same room as a white woman who looks like you. And at the time, I had bleach blonde hair. I was a certain visually looking white woman. And I think about that all the time and I thought it was so beautiful of her just to say it that way. But I think what she's saying is what you're saying, our minds might have the same ideas, but our bodies are charged when we get into the room in a way that will make me unable to be vulnerable. Yeah, I am so glad she said,
not for you, but for her. For her to understand the texture of what this was and not overriding for you, I think whether you got something out of it or not, I think for her to recognize that this had the potential to be extracted. And she didn't want to put herself in, you know, for most of our history, especially the black woman's body, for most of our is relatively new that a black woman can say that to a white woman and be somewhat sure she's not going to get raped.
Hmm. For most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every aspect of my body. For most of our history, for most of our history, the white body has had full and unfettered access to every orifice, every idea, every understanding of my body. It is relatively, and this is an obvious, has been an obvious problem for visibly melanchated bodies.
But it's also a problem for white folks because white folks don't understand the urges around why they expect my difference and that they're willing to murder me when I'm not deferential. They're willing to limit and thwart access and opportunity when I'm not deferential. Right? White bodies, Dr. King said that part of the problem is that white bodies have been put through a mass education around who the black person is and what the black body is. They've been
put through a mass education. They refuse to develop a mass de-education and a mass re-education as it relates to the black body. They refuse. That's part of what the problem is. They don't even, that's shit. They don't even know it's a thing. Even good white folks have this recoil when a black body says, you don't have access to me. I will not allow you access to me. There's something that happens to white bodies where that happens. I don't care how good you are,
I don't care how nice you are. That is irrelevant to the level of ferality that black bodies and visibly-mellied bodies have to continue with. That is irrelev- your niceness in your kindness is irrelevant. It's not communal. You have tempered this with other white bodies and you developed a
sense of this communally. Is there something about that that is the heart of the millions of what we now call Karen moments like when a white body sees bodies of culture and with the thing that seems to be the common denominator in those moments where a white person calls in the police is there seems to be a body of culture experiencing some sort of freedom or joy in public that causes some kind of reaction in a white person's body. That is not happening in anyone's mind,
right? You can't think your way into that being logical. Explain to us body to body. Yeah. For me, the Karen and the kin moments, people look at them as Karen. You can go on Instagram, you can go on YouTube and you can pull up hours and hours of videos of white folks acting fucking bananas, right? At barbecues, at churches, right? We look at those as events and incidences. What if we didn't look at it like that? What if we said this was structural?
Right? That it is woven into the reflexive response in white bodies in general, not a Karen, but Karen's as philosophy, Karenism as a philosophy. What if we did that? What if we stop looking at this as events and started looking at it as structure, as philosophy, as the what I call it plantation ethos that the most enduring organizing structure in American is the plantation. The plantation literally organized white people. It organized their sense of relationships with
each other. It organized their sense of hierarchy. It organized their sense of religion. It organized their sense of pigmetocracy. It organized their sense of sex roles. It organized their, you guys understand what it means? The plantation organized white people. When the plantation came into existence, America was the 13 colonies. Here's the thing that we forget. Colonies are filled with colonized white people. Colonized white folks that were fleeing something.
That has never been dealt with. This is why the white woman is so fucking mad at the white man and doesn't understand why. This is why I tell white men, I'm sorry, I can't do your interview. Yeah. I do what the woman did. You're the second man we've had on in 300 episodes because I can't be in the same room. I understand that. Listen, let me say this.
When white women were walking around their towns, their churches and all of that, in every place that they could go and they started walking around seeing little black children with their husbands' faces on them. That never got dealt with. The rape is part of the way that this country got wealthy. Land theft is how this, when people say, well, how did America get so wealthy? Freeland and free labor.
And the philosophy is to try and get back to, when we talk about conservative, that's what they're saying. They don't never say it because it ain't good to say. That's what they mean. That's the again part. That's the again part. Yeah. We want to get it back to free land and free labor. And if we can't get it back to that, we want to get as close as fucking humanly possible.
We don't want to pay for your labor. I'll give you another one. I said to see other day, can you believe that we, and this is why I believe that America does, when it comes to race, doesn't have a liberatory bone in its fucking body. Is that we allow people, we allow rich, permanently rich white men to, at one point, pay us for at least as close to our labor as possible. So you pay me $20 an hour, but you take $25 an hour because you know, my labor's actually
work $45 an hour. You take $25 an hour and you put it in the pension and hold it. So when I'm old, I can actually do some other things. That was the fucking deal, right? And we allowed these motherfuckers to tell us about a 401k. We allowed them to say, now you get to contribute. What motherfuck I am contributing. I gave you $45 worth of labor. Your job was to take $25 an hour and put it over here, right? And we say, yeah, that's something like a good idea. Let's let me contribute
of the 20. Let me contribute $5 an hour to that. And we took it. That's what I mean by free land, by genociding the indigenous people and free labor by enslaving African people and Black people and white women wearing pussy hats and Washington DC and going to a damn thing about that. This whole thing is right folks refusal to deal and contribute themselves so they can actually begin to create a living embodied anti-racist generative culture. They have no appetite
for what it takes to condition themselves and not condition themselves. But condition themselves so their babies can actually so most of us, our kids don't learn from just our instruction. They learn from what our bodies recoil from and lean it and conditioning ourselves to be able to say I have to do some conditioning and tempering. So my babies experience more room around race, not just instruction around these, but they actually experience, oh mama can work with that.
Mamas can work with they know, you know what I mean? This is why the whole CRT and the reflexive stuff and the burning of the books and all that shit is really about what they're telling you is that white folks have no appetite for conditioning when it comes to race. None. Tell us what you mean by conditioning. When we don't have an appetite for conditioning, we don't have the appetite for the discomfort of its settling in our bodies for the what is
the conditioning? We don't have no appetite so Amanda if I came to you like I said earlier about the marathon. It goes right to that that's it. If I tell you that I'm going to run a marathon tomorrow and then I can vent you I keep saying no I did everything I'm supposed to do I read a book. I did this every time I say that you go I can't trust his judgment. I don't trust his judgment. So when I told you I read Rob and Angela's white fragility so I'm all set. That's the equivalent of
the I don't trust your fucking judgment. Yeah. Got it. There's nothing about that that means anything. Yeah. I know you put it up there like it means and I mean and me and Rob and I tell you. I know I know. I'm just saying probably half the people that are listening to this read that. That's what I'm saying. They read it and they and it was good and they ain't read it again since.
Yeah. They haven't grabbed another white body and said for the next 30 years me and you going to roll around race specifically and we are going to cultivate between ourselves a different way of understanding this and we may not be able to get to what we think we need to get to but at least we're going to nibble on this at least we're going to put the road work in. I'm not just going to read a book I'm not like I am going to body to body we're going to raise babies
in this shit right we are going to get divorced in this shit. Do you guys understand what I mean? Like this is my life. This is how we get down. Most white folks ain't talking about it like that. Most white folks is talking about it. I read white fragility and it changed my life. My fuck I can't tell. I can only tell because you told me. That's the only way I get to you said it and that's supposed to be enough. If I put all of my stock and what white people say as opposed to what white people do
I'd be fucked up. Like I'd be really fucked up. So that's what I mean when I say temper in condition I'm saying if you're going to do anything that pushes you up against your adult developmental edges if you're going to do something you're going to experience it as a sensation piece. You're going to experience it in terms of imagination. You're going to experience it in terms of quaking and twisting and and gnarliness and images that pop up that you've been trying to tamp down
and get the fuck out of your head. You're going to experience what it takes to metabolize that and use that shit as fuel for your growth as opposed to fuel that burns you to fuck up. It's the same fuel. It's the same fuel. It's the same thing. When people come into my office and they say you know rest my I really need to get this out of me and I say if I was able to actually do that and remove that from you what you would need in order to be the person that you think you want to
be or get to I just remove the fuel for that. Is that how the connection to dirty pain and clean pain? That's dirty pain and clean pain. Yeah. Most of us let me ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to y'all all adult people. So right. So we all adults.
Yes. Yes. All adultish. Yeah. Well, don't this. So let me ask you if I said if you ever been with somebody and you've been with them and you and y'all are having a good time and you fucking good, you're eating good, you're doing all other things that you do but in your belly something says God, I shouldn't be with this. God, like almost exclusively. You know what I mean? Like God damn. But I love these nasty drawers but God damn I knew they
ain't good for me. You know what I mean? And your boys and your friends and your girlfriends and your mom and your daddy and everybody are like, what the fuck you doing? And you go, I don't know but I can't stop. You are not going to let the fuck there is. What I tell people is that we know dirty pain. We know dirty. And if you're lucky after you do that for a while, something begins to move in the way that you go. Yeah. I don't know what I'm going to do but I know I can't
do this no more. I can't do this no more. I need the blocker. I need the blocker. I got a blocker. A blocker. And everything says unblocker. Just one more time. Like you know what I mean? That you're playing with clean and dirty. There's a part of you that's tied to your integrity that's part tied to creation itself. That gnaw is that you that says if you go through this it's going to be painful. If you stay with this it's going to be painful. You get to choose which pain you want
to continue. As adults we don't get the choice between pain and no pain most of the time. As adults we get the choice between clean and dirty and most of us want a choice between pain and no pain. You don't fucking get that as an adult. That's not what you get. You get to choose between. Am I going to do this clean and painful and dirty and painful? Those are the choices. Resma I thought
about that so much. That when I was watching painfully watching the rebuttal to the state of the union where Katie Britt came on and sat in a kitchen small white woman wearing a tiny cross close to fake tears crying about a fake threat in the form of these violent immigrant bodies just crying and lying that I just was like a dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty I don't watch this shit no more honestly and I'm not saying you know the white folks that
are listening to you I'm not saying y'all shouldn't watch it. I'm saying for me I don't like I'm not playing I'm not asking you I don't need to see your performative shit and I'm talking about liberals too right I'm writing a book right now and there's a chapter in it where I call
the feckless and the fascist I think liberals are some of the most feckless they don't understand that these motherfuckers are not trying to reach across the aisle that this shit ain't they're saying that and you keep trying to find the middle road and the middle ground these motherfuckers tell you
we will murder your fucking children in Sandy Hook and you motherfuckers won't do a goddamn thing about you won't do a fucking thing about it 21 white babies were murdered and y'all didn't do a motherfucking thing about it you didn't bust a grape in a motherfucking food fight so if you
ain't gonna do nothing about that I know you ain't gonna do nothing about my baby that's the conditioning and the tempering that I'm talking about right I read this thing one time you know people said the idea right wing and left ring are all part of the same racist bird and if you don't
understand that you get confused about that type of shit it's like when white people are sitting up there crying and then other white bodies liberal white bodies are just the gas that the lying and stuff like that but you ain't gonna do nothing about it you're gonna be upset about it but there
is a thing around your own dirtiness that is duff-tailing with that dirty mess so it's like the thoughts and prayers this thoughts and prayer yeah that's exactly what it is in white folks are not interested in developing a living embodied anti-racist generative culture with each other there's
so busy looking for the brown guru the black guru the indigenous guru like there's so busy looking for them that they don't realize they have to literally start with each other and they have to do it and create a communal ethos around ushering in and emerging a different way of being
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things. This is the culture piece that is so strong this is the why you talk about how alluring the cultures are that are being created in the hate world talk about what they have and why are anemic offering on the other side is not bringing anyone in. No and it ain't going to yes listen listen think about this close your eyes let me close your eyes white people white bodies started from nothing and they tilled the soil and they were faithful to God and they were the chosen
people and they spread the gospel of the one true God Jesus Christ across the world and they have created things that did not exist before their purity and their whiteness came on the scene and it is their job to make sure that God exists on this planet and that anything that white people do
that's mistake it is already washed away by God and their dominion over everything in creation now keep your eyes closed that's the story that story even if you don't like it has a beginning a middle and the end it says what you should be doing and not doing it tells you your positioning
now open your eye tell me an equivalent story from liberals the story is find the right words say them on Instagram that's it there is no glue so if I got symbols of the swastika if I got symbols of hoods if I got symbols that are a hundred years old hundreds of years old and you're going to come and talk to me about a fucking bill you're going to come and talk to me about you know we need to get out and vote but if I'm a white person that's already available the symbols of that are all and
it's got a whole story and it's steeped in hundreds of years but yeah I'm trying to convince you of what's right and what's wrong there's no there there yeah and then you've got the hate groups with their
uniforms and their rules of belonging and their offering of togetherness and their fucking uniforms and all the things it's organized is the body they also believe that they're great yeah liberals were always wimpy it's like we don't believe that we are there there's no there there's no there there
but that's because of the dirty pain we're apologetic and we're ashamed because we have the dirty pain white liberals are feckless as fuck I'll give you a quick example I'll give you a quick example this is why I talk about it as white bodies and not as particular identities right so when I do
my workshops and stuff like that inevitably I'll have a gay white woman that'll come up to me afterwards and say where's my other new exactly what you're talking about because I'm a gay white woman and I've been right and I said it and I said hold on hold on please don't compare yourself
to me being a heterosexual black black don't do that here's what I want to ask you in the community of gay let's say we say gay or lesbian women in that community are black lesbian women at the top or the bottom of that community and if you say we're all mixed together I'm gonna say you a
fucking lie you have never talked to a lesbian black woman in your life if you say that to me so I'm not talking about your identity your identity is important what I'm saying is there's another piece to that too and this pigmentocracy is woven in and around and through every
institution every movement everything that we are doing how we interact are positioning our morons is woven in and around and through that and most white folks regardless of their identity are unwilling to examine that and so for me when I'm talking about body the white body visibly
melanated body the black body I am talking about philosophy and structure and feral philosophy and structure and so you know it's important to understand that when you're talking about what it takes in order for people to begin white bodies and talking about white
bodies now in order for white bodies to begin to work with and develop a story that other their white babies coming later on can have something that is left that will nourish them so the way the creation works is that the if you just look at how creation functions is that something a structure
or something has to die in order to create the nutrients for the new structure to emerge from yeah white bodies don't understand that they want to think about I think that idea of God has fucked white people because they think about God as a bestowal entity they think about God as if
I just am in alignment if I just do this if I just do that then something will be bestowed on me because I've done this stuff that's usually not how it works it usually works because you do something or something happens and you get to the edges and you become and something emerges from the grind
and then something emerges through right that's not our understanding of creation what I just said is in alignment with creation not a bestowal right and so for me I think white bodies are not interested in going through the emergence the closest that they can get to it is fucking yoga
right like like white yoga like like white folks will yoga and sourdough bread and kale the fuck out of everything right like y'all can kale everywhere but that's because that's individual because we that's what I said we want to purify ourselves but don't I understand that that's
like anorexia defined right I want to purify myself I want to be better I just don't want to be involved with any other human beings doing it that's exactly right and then you run around and say well why can't we do this like why can't we all get together motherfucker you have no interest when that
damn 400 500 years of charge come spring loaded charge the reason why you don't want to do it because you know a spring load right you know a spring load so you don't you know it right that's why that's why because you know you are not conditioned to deal with that spring this
is why I'm one of only two men that have been on this thing you don't want to deal with white man you ain't going you fuck you I got my own one fuckish I got my own podcast I don't want you more fuckers on here I'm not going to have you motherfuckers on right and by doing that you don't temper
and condition yourself and I'm not telling you to bring the asses home I'm not but I'm saying not doing it is doing something that's right I'm not to let's see you all look at these other I'm not look this your podcast do what the fuck you want to do I'm not telling you what to do I'm saying
there's a certain conditioning that you're doing but by not doing yeah right maybe you figure out ways to do it by not having them on the pipe maybe there's some way that you forget but you're not conditioning yourself to deal with the 500 years of rage that you have that's been passed down
through white quote unquote female bodies that shit the spring loaded that is still there the spring load is the charge and the spring load is the charge is 400 years of charge this is why when I'm working with people who are addicted and they don't want to deal with race I'm like oh
you are in an environment in which the whole construct of this shit was predicated on pigment toxic and you think that that's separate from your addiction you literally will be that your unwillingness to work with race is not fueling some at least a little piece of your
addiction the idea that this whole thing in America has been constructed on raping people that look like me for 250 years legally legally legally legally could rape people that look like me for 250 years and you don't think that that's fucking what you're so bright you don't think what's
happening in Palestine is fucking what you're so bright like you don't want to get up out of bed and you just think it's your depression kicking up again or you just need to put your fucking you know sunlight on your face more it takes some more vitamin D that's what you think we are
living on a living entity right this moment connected to live other living entities and we don't believe that our feet sloshing around in indigenous blood is impacting us you don't think that's having anything to do so whenever you're urges to deal with your addiction start fucking popping up
you only trying to find out what's happening in the personal right that might be you have no interest in historical you have no interest in the intergenerational you have no interest in the personal in the persistent institutional you just go right to what's happening
between me and my man man the right and all of that shit is balled in and you have no way of pulling out a little bit nibbling and working with it so you can get conditioned by what's an example of clean pain let me ask you this you said earlier you said as my started to begin to understand a little bit about how not just my head and thinking about this book, my body. I understand it differently now than I did even the first time I started to read
the book. Okay. There's a part of that that when you say that to me that you experience as resource. Okay. I got a little bit more room with it. Right? There's more room to be able to kind of play with the idea that my body is engaged in this. Right? At the same time you say that there's also constriction that says I might use again too. That fear of, yeah, I got some of it. But there's this other shoe that might drop. Right? And usually our interrogation is to say,
how do I make sure I'm not in this environment? How do I make sure I'm not in? I'm not around toxic people. I'm not doing this then. Yep. Right? And in that you can begin to condition yourself. So that piece becomes fuel for this piece. That in that you begin to understand the difference between clean and dirty, not by gorging on it, but by nibbling on it in little bits and then pulling out and going to do something to come back and nibbling on it a little bit and then over time you
notice, oh, there's a little bit more room here. That didn't go away and I'm not like busing up in the chest and now I'm super woman. It's just, I got a little bit more room with it now than I did. That's clean and dirty. That's clean and dirty. And most of us are not willing to do that. Most of us want epiphanies. We want something to be bestowed on us. Not that that constriction. So one of the things I always say is that constriction.
The constriction of little constriction in the body, the constriction of knowing, the constriction, the face to constriction, whatever it is, whatever how that constriction is, that that's that non that embodied non can over time be cultivated into embodied not knowing. That's good. Most of us don't want to deal with the non. We want to get rid of the non at any cost. And the moment you get rid of it is that the moment you find yourself fucked up. Yep. Said addicts everywhere.
Yeah. Yeah. Smart as fuck. Yeah. Smart as fuck. And you like something seems off with you. Something seems off. You smart as fuck. Something's off with you. Yeah. I don't know what it is. You got the answer for everything. Something's fucking off with you. That's creation itself. That's what I'm saying. There are these intelligences that we have that have been crowded out by cognition. Yeah. That's what I mean by understanding it differently. Like I have found myself in situations where
I feel in my body. Oh, this is the culture I'm in condition too. So for example, Resma, I'll say something as a white public person, which people will bring to my attention is revealing a narrow vision. What I have noticed in my body is that after that moment, I think I'm feeling clean pain in that moment. But then this thing happens that I would not have understood unless I was paying more attention to my body, which is that behind the scenes,
that thing will happen publicly. And then behind the scenes, there will be a lot of white people, specifically men who email me privately, nothing publicly. And they'll say, we just saw that. And that is so unfair. And we're all talking about it. And you're here. And Resma, I will feel in my body to me as a white woman, what dirty pain feels like and why it's so hard to identify is because it feels like comfort. Yes. Yes. It feels like, so can we do some right? Let's do some. Let's do some.
So notice when you just told me that story. Let's just pause for a second. As you notice that story, what are the images that are popping through? What are the images? Okay. So what comes to my mind is the whole sleeping beauty thing. Pause. Stay with the sleeping bee. Stay with it. What's the emotional content? As you notice, the sleeping beauty images, what's the emotional content? I just keep, yeah, right there, right there. I just keep thinking of death and safety. Pause.
When you notice the death and safety, where do you notice it in your body or outside of your body? Where did you notice death first? It's all chest for me. Yeah. Notice that. Notice that. Where did you notice the safety? It's a little bit lower. Yeah. Yeah. So just land on the lower. As you notice, the lower, the little bit of safety, is there any meaning that shows up? Any urges that show up? I mean, Resma, I'm feeling is the presence of this one picture of sleeping
beauty where the like man is over her. Pause. Pause. Stop. Stop. You don't have to keep going into the narrative. There is this man over her. There's this man over her. She's pure sleeping beauty, white skin. There's this man over her. So at the same time, it's Prince Charming is at the same time, he's got a fucking ax in the scene. So both things are happening at the same time. White women have in dealt with that. Open your eyes. What we just did was play with the intelligences. We played with
the intelligence of image. We played with the intelligence of sensation. We played with the intelligence of meaning making urges, emotional vibe. Do you guys understand what I mean? That's all we did. White and all of that was happening at the same time. All we did was just pull it out and nibble on pieces of it for itself. Just not answer. If you do it out enough, something begins to move, begins to quake, begins to get worked with in ways that when you just try and deal with it
all at the same time, it can't be worked with because it overwhelms. It's too much. So that image of having this man over this woman like that and there's been conflicting sensation that goes with it. That never gets worked through. So when these white men email you and say, you know, we saw that and we just think that's unfair. There's a part of you that goes, a white man take care of me and there's a part of you that goes, what the fuck is this? At the same time. Exactly right.
White women don't even know that that's something they should be working with. John would even know y'all should be working with that. Wow. Resma, every interview you do or talk you do, you just are so generous with yourself and your wisdom and your energy and your mind. Not me. It's my people. It's not me. When you hear me talk, you hear my people. You don't just hear me. You hear Professor Mahgoud Al-Kaati. You hear James
Baldwin. You hear because I'm part of them. I'm not apart from them. So that's what you hear as generosity, which you hear as radical generosity is because of my people. That's I've been conditioned by that. So this is not me, myself. I am my people. Wow. Thank you, Resma. You're welcome. Can I ask some? Can I pull up some? You can do it everyone. Platform that's coming out. Black octopus society. So it's blackoptipussociety.com. And it's my online piece subscription and stuff like
that, workshops, all that different type of stuff. So if we'll go there, they want to hook up with me. We will do that. Black octopus. Yeah. Black octopus society. Society. Cool. We'll put it in the show notes for sure. Black octopus society. Thank you. Resma, thank you. Thank you. Resma, you're fucking awesome. You're fucking awesome. Thank you. Oh, that's the only time Abbie's ever said that. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye.
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We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is created and hosted by Glennon Doyle, Abby Wombach, and Amanda Doyle in partnership with Odyssey. Our executive producer is Jenna Wise Berman. This show is produced by Lauren LaGrasso, Alice and Shot, Dina Kleiner, and Bill Shultz. I give you Tish Melton and Randy Carlisle. That I'm the one for me, and because I'm mine, I want the line. Cause we're adventurous and heartbreak, so mad, a final destination,
and a plan to stop asking directions. Some places they've never been, and to be loved, we need to be known, we'll finally find our way back home, and through the joy and pain that our lives bring. We can do a heartbreak. I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new star. I'm not the problem, sometimes things fall apart. And I continue to believe the best people are free, and it took some time, but I'm finally fine. Cause we're adventurous and heartbreak, so mad, a final destination,
and a plan to stop asking directions. Some places they've never been, and to be loved, we need to be known, we'll finally find our way back home, and through the joy and pain that our lives bring. We can do a heartbreak. I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new star. I'm not the problem, I'm not the problem, and I'm not the problem, and to be loved, we need to be known, we'll finally find our way back home, and through the joy and pain that our lives bring.
We can do a heartbreak. Yeah, we can do a heartbreak. Yeah, we can do a heartbreak.